April 18, 2007

NEWS: Illegal Immigration = More ID Theft?

In news that is sure to do absolutely nothing good for illegal aliens’ beleaguered status in America, creditlock.com is reporting that there seems to be a statistical link between illegal immigration and the increased incidence of identity theft on a state-by-state basis. The site initially examined the issue as a means of testing the hypothesis, oft-cited by anti-immigration factions that higher populations of illegal aliens tend to have a higher rate of crime, with identity theft addressed especially.

The site put together a chart, lining up the fifty U.S. states by descending order of identity theft occurrence, along with percent of employment related identity theft. The reasoning was that illegal immigrants would be most likely to use a fake identification with valid working status to obtain a decent job.

With few exceptions, the tables did, in fact, demonstrate that states with high employment related identity theft incidence did have the worst overall identity theft rankings. Likewise, it trended that states with low prevalence of employment related identity theft cases had some of the most promising identity theft statistics. Employment related identity theft in the four worst-ranked states, Arizona, Nevada, California and Texas, totalled 22.35% of all identity theft reports in those states, coming in significantly higher than the national average of 13.5% for the U.S. as a whole. Employment related identity theft in the four highest-ranked states, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota and Vermont comprised about 9.55% of all Identity Theft cases in those states, well below the 13.5% for the U.S. as a whole.
 

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